The present invention relates to detecting fissures for lung lobe segmentation in medical imaging data, such as computed tomography (CT) image data.
The lungs are divided into five lobes, which operate as separate functional units. The lung lobes are divided by thin walls called fissures. Problems within the lungs are often confined to a particular lobe. Thus, in order to determine in which lobe a problem is located, it is important to be able to detect lobar fissures in medical imaging data, such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Lobar fissures can be difficult to detect in CT and MRI data. One reason for this difficulty is that the fissures defining the boundaries of the lobes are very thin and can be obscured by noise, artifacts, and partial volume effects. Furthermore, various lung diseases can erode or affect lung fissures such that they are even harder to detect.